“The Blonsky Device,” a mini-opera in four acts, had its world premiere during the Igs, offering musical interludes to break up the award ceremony. But these people must be on another planet.” Antics Abound A Physics Prize winner told the crowd that “feats like running on the surface of a pond, that only lizards and birds can do, also possible for humans. The joint prize in Astronomy and Biology went to an international team for discovering that dung beetles which have gotten off track can find their way home by looking at the Milky Way. Winners of the joint prize in Astronomy and Biology carry balls in honor of their study subject, dung beetles. One of the winners-outfitted with a guitar and harmonica like Bob Dylan-was singing a tune about “the correlation between attraction and intoxication” when he was stopped cold, mid-stanza, by the aforementioned eight-year-old. The Psychology Prize, for example, went to the authors of the paper “Beauty is in the Eye of the Beer Holder,” which found that peoples’ sense of their own attractiveness rose as they consumed more alcohol. Last night, others learned that lesson the hard way. I know this firsthand, having been cut off by a previous incarnation of Miss Sweetie Poo, and it’s not a pleasant experience. Please stop, I’m bored…” While the routine can get tiresome, it is extremely effective. After a minute (and not a second more ), she gives them the boot, by repeating, in a whiny tone of ever-increasing volume: “Please stop, I’m bored. Her responsibility is to prevent speakers and pontificators from droning on endlessly. Abrahams is the originator of this show and the driving force behind it, but the task of keeping the trains running on time, so to speak, falls on the diminutive shoulders of a cute but obstinate eight-year-old girl called Miss Sweetie Poo. Miss Sweetie Poo cuts off a musical performance by the winners of the Psychology Prize. Ig Nobels for Beer, Beetles and Bob Dylan As paper detritus was cleared from the stage, the master of ceremonies, Marc Abrahams, took the podium to welcome “our most special guests, the new Ig Nobel Prize winners.” Every one of them, Abrahams said, “has done something that makes you laugh and then makes you think.” And if you think too hard about it, you might even cry, especially if you’re slicing an onion at the time-but more on that later. My attempts at unmanned flight were, I’m sad to say, abysmal-brief trajectories invariably ending in nosedives. The event is also dedicated, as noted, to paper airplanes, during two 30-second intervals of joyful mayhem. It’s an annual ritual dedicated to the zany underbelly of science-the curious investigations and even weirder findings that emerge from them, which won’t win any of the participants a trip to Stockholm but might win them a one way (no-expenses-paid) trip to Cambridge, Mass., where dubious notoriety awaits them. ![]() ” Hundreds, if not thousands, of airplanes were soon launched, and so began the twenty-third Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony. “The ceremony will not start until I give the countdown and say, ‘Go.’ After I give the countdown, you can begin throwing paper airplanes. “Do not throw them yet, as the ceremony has not yet officially begun,” the speaker, a safety monitor of some sort, admonished the crowd. The first speaker at Harvard’s Sanders Theater last night set the tone for the entire proceedings, going into a lengthy discussion of paper airplanes and their eventual throwing-an undertaking that would purportedly adhere to the strictest modern flight regulations. A round of paper airplane-throwing at the Sanders Theater during the 2013 Ig Nobel Awards.
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